Engineering Roles

Space systems are challenging in ways that terrestrial RF isn’t. You’re constrained by orbital mechanics, link budgets, power margins, radiation hardening, and update cycles measured in months, not days. The signal processing problem is real; you need to extract mission intelligence from space-based platforms where compute is scarce and the data flowing back to Earth is expensive to transmit. You’ll work with embedded real-time software, signal processing algorithms tuned to space-borne RF hardware, and the ground-segment architecture that integrates satellite feeds into the broader mission picture. Python, C++, and MATLAB are your tools; Kalman filters, payload-processing architectures, and threat-tuned signal chains are your domain.
You’re the bridge between the payload engineers who design the hardware and the mission teams who consume the data. Your work goes from breakthrough algorithm idea—a new approach to space-based emitter detection, a more efficient compression technique for bandwidth-constrained links—through validation against lab hardware, to deployment on a spacecraft. Sometimes you’ll work in simulation and analysis. Sometimes you’ll validate your code against actual on-orbit data you can’t discuss. And when the system is deployed, you’ll support the transition to operations, refining the algorithms as threats evolve.